[shaklee3]

Completely agree. While the video is awesome (nice job!), the logistics of pulling something like this off is extremely difficult. It's different from the "you could have said that about landing a rocket", in that there are thousands of different routes taken for different customers per second, and each route has its own issues like portillo said. The minute one stops working, debugging that will be a huge challenge.

The user terminal as a gateway idea is also not practical due to link budget (EIRP and G/T), but also the much lower availability they'll be dealing with.

[mhandley]

Computationally, it's difficult, but I don't think it's intractable. Bear in mind this this is not an animation, but a real-time simulation:

https://youtu.be/m05abdGSOxY?t=428

I'm running Dijkstra across this mesh at 30fps in real-time on my laptop while also doing the 3d animation. My laptop fan does spin a bit, but it's not crazily optimized code, and for the video I was also recording to H.264 simultaneously. Doing routing for all customers simultaneously is certainly feasible if their groundstations do the computation, based on routing state supplied in real-time by the constellation. Other solutions are probably possible too, but this seems simplest to me, and scales linearly with customers.

[shaklee3]

While that's true for a first approximation, weather, gateway outages (very common as you increase the number of them), total satellite capacity (making sure you aren't overloading a single link), and just non-working paths are commonplace. Just making sure that you aren't overloading a particular satellite is an extremely difficult problem. That would be really neat if you could work that into your simulation, where it would bypass certain satellites if there's just no more bandwidth available.